If you run a restaurant with more than one prep station, someone on your team is spending their shift playing air traffic controller — making sure the grill finishes the burger at the same time the fryer drops the fries and the cold station wraps the salad. That’s your expeditor, and their job is basically a math problem.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can do that math faster.
Smart Routing Means Everything Lands Together
AI-powered kitchen display systems (KDS) replace the basic ticket screen with something that actually thinks. Instead of just showing orders in sequence, a smart KDS calculates prep time per item and staggers send-times to each station so everything for a table finishes simultaneously.
**Fresh KDS** is one option in this space that has marketed intelligent routing and integration with Square point-of-sale (POS) systems. However, it’s a smaller product and features may have changed — check their official site to confirm current capabilities, integrations, and pricing before committing.
**Toast KDS** is bundled with Toast’s POS platform and includes smart ticket routing, estimated fulfillment times, and performance analytics that surface bottlenecks. Fair warning: Toast’s pricing is notoriously opaque and changes often. Ask for the exact KDS cost in writing before you sign.
The practical upside? You reduce or eliminate the need for a dedicated expo position. In a small restaurant, that person can be prepping, plating, or running food instead.
Stop Prepping Based on Gut Feeling
The other place AI earns its keep in a kitchen is demand forecasting and inventory management. Two tools worth looking at — though they do different things:
**ClearCOGS** is an AI demand forecasting tool built specifically for restaurants. It connects to your POS, analyzes sales history, and factors in things like weather and day-of-week patterns to generate daily prep lists automatically. It’s designed with independent operators in mind.
**MarketMan** is primarily an inventory management platform — think tracking stock levels, managing purchasing, and controlling food costs. It does include some forecasting features, but its strength is inventory, not AI-powered demand prediction. MarketMan integrates with Toast, Square, and Clover, and serves a wide range of restaurant sizes, from independents to multi-unit chains.
Think about it: a sandwich shop that preps too much avocado on slow Mondays and runs out on Fridays. A forecasting tool like ClearCOGS can flag that pattern and generate daily prep lists automatically. That eliminates the time a manager spends each morning eyeballing yesterday’s sales and guessing.
Both tools require you to contact them for pricing, so you’ll need to reach out directly to get a quote that fits your operation.
Phone Orders Don’t Need a Human Either
If you’re a pizza shop getting 30+ phone orders during dinner rush, each one eating 2-4 minutes of a team member’s time, that adds up fast. Thirty calls at three minutes each is 90 minutes of labor pulled away from the kitchen every night.
**Slang.ai** is an AI phone answering system for restaurants that handles reservations and answers frequently asked questions (FAQs). It can free up your team from fielding routine calls during peak hours. However, if your main need is phone-based order-taking — like a pizza shop — verify directly with Slang.ai whether their system supports that. Their core marketed capabilities center on call answering, FAQs, and reservations, not necessarily taking food orders. Check their site for current pricing and capabilities before committing.
If order-taking is your biggest phone bottleneck, ask specifically about that feature when you reach out, or look into competing AI phone systems that explicitly advertise order-taking for restaurants.
One Thing to Do This Week
Pick the bottleneck that costs you the most time: expo coordination, daily prep planning, or phone orders during rush. Then look at one tool from this list. Just one. Check the pricing page, see if it integrates with your current POS, and run the numbers on what that recovered time is worth to you per month.
That’s how you figure out if AI belongs in your kitchen — not by chasing hype, but by doing the math on your own operation.